Brody Theater crew out to prove improv isn't just for comedy with ambitious new show, 'Script Tease'

A small group of improvisers crowd the stage during a rehearsal at the Brody Theater, cautiously thumbing through scripts. They've just been assigned characters in a six-page play they've never seen, and once they perform those six pages they'll have to drop the scripts and improvise the rest. Nobody in the theater knows what's going to happen next, but it all begins now.

The show is called "Script Tease," a bold experiment running through November that aims to bridge the gap between scripted and unscripted theater. Almost everyone in the production has experience in both worlds, and they're sending out a message that the two have more in common than we may think.

"I've made my life and my career around the idea that improvisational theater and scripted theater are not binary categories, that they actually belong very much together," says Domeka Parker, director of the show and artistic curator at the Brody. "I've put a lot of effort into raising the bar in improvisational theater."

As she directs the cast, Parker's focus becomes clear. She doles out advice about building scenes and investing in characters, but talks little about the thing most people link improv with -- comedy.

That's for good reason, explains Adrienne Flagg, an actor in the show. Like Parker, Flagg has spent a good part of her career straddling the line between the scripted and unscripted worlds of theater. Improv was never meant to be comedic, she says; it was invented to solve theatrical problems. When actors started to improvise whole shows, though, the laughter came about naturally.

"The best laughs and the most common laughs are not joke laughs, they're laughs of recognition," Flagg says. When improvisers work together to build a lush scene one element at a time, embodying characters with honest emotions and reactions, they present audiences with scenarios to which they can relate.

"We would aim not to make the audience laugh, but rather to make the audience feel," Parker adds. "And if laughter and happiness is one of those feelings, terrific."

Despite their best efforts to date, the improv format most people recognize is the comedic game-based style, like the popular TV show "Whose Line is it Anyway?" In Portland, the link between improv and comedy is widespread. Groups such as ComedySportz improvise at venues like Curious Comedy Theater, and often do shows alongside stand-up comedians.

But by associating improvisers with comedians, audiences may miss out on all the other styles of improvisational theater, Parker says.

"I think what the people in Portland are accustomed to is the loud Uncle Bob of improv. He comes to Thanksgiving and we enjoy him for so long and then he goes home, hopefully, or we put a blanket over him," she says. "He's part of the family, but he's not the whole family."

Among the audience Parker and her fellow improvisers are trying to sway is the traditional theater itself. While unscripted performers maintain a certain reverence for their scripted brethren, the respect isn't always mutual, Parker says. "Many actors who are trained in scripted theater are terrified of improvisation, and one of the ways they can avoid being cornered into doing something like that is to believe it's beneath them."

In "Script Tease," Parker and her cast of eight hope to bridge that divide, little by little. The format, like many in the world of improvisational theater, is borrowed from another group. Parker initially saw "Script Tease" performed by a Belgian group when she was in Europe last winter. She loved the idea, she says, but hated the execution. When she returned stateside she decided she had to do it right.

Parker quickly recruited Flagg, as well as local playwright Sara Jean Accuardi. While Parker and Flagg put together a cast, Accuardi courted fellow playwrights to contribute short, incomplete works for the show.

Her list of contributors includes prolific Portland playwrights Steve Patterson and Victoria Parker-Pohl (who also happens to be Parker's mother). Contributors seem to enjoy their chance to be part of the experiment, Accuardi says. "Every writer knows the feeling of when you just start writing something you don't know what you're doing, and it just takes off and goes in some direction which you don't feel you have any control over."

At each performance, the actors will be handed the contributed scripts onstage. They'll do a cold reading of the roughly six-page play, then cast the scripts aside and make the rest of the show up on the spot. No pressure.

"It's like a cliff," Flagg says. "You take a step and hope a cloud appears that you can walk upon. And you're holding hands with a few other people who will either float with you or drag you down."

It seems daunting, but the cast is up to the task. Wrapping up their first rehearsed run of the show, their concerns aren't with the huge task of improvising a full play based on a brief script, but rather with the minute details of the form.

After the run-through, the cast asks Parker what they should do with their scripts when they reach the end.

Should they mic-drop them to the floor? Throw them offstage? The ideas seem a little insensitive, considering the bridge building the show intends to do. Parker mulls it over for a moment. Baskets, she suggests at last. Place them neatly in baskets offstage when you get the chance.

"Script Tease" runs Saturdays Nov. 9, 16, 23 and 30 at 7:30 p.m. at The Brody Theater, 16 N.W. Broadway. Tickets are $12 and can be purchased at the door, or in advance at brodytheater.com.